1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for application message conversion using a feed adapter.
2. Description of Related Art
Messaging environments are generally available to provide data communication between message sending devices and message receiving devices using application messages. An application message is a quantity of data organized into one or more data fields and is passed from a message producer installed on a message sending device to a message consumer installed on a message receiving device. An application message is a form of message recognized by application software operating in the application layer of a data communication protocol stack—as contrasted for example with a transport message or network message which are forms of messages recognized in the transport layer and the network layer respectively. An application message may represent, for example, numeric or textual information, images, encrypted information, and computer program instructions. In a financial market data environment, an application message is commonly referred to as a ‘tick’ and includes financial market data such as, for example, financial quotes or financial news. Financial quotes include bid and ask prices for any given financial security. A ‘bid’ refers to the highest price a buyer is willing to pay for a security. An ‘ask’ refers to the lowest price a seller is willing to accept for a security.
Often in messaging environments, message formats recognized by message sending devices are not recognized by message receiving devices. Such messaging environments typically include feed adapters that are capable of application message conversion. The basic task of the feed adapter is to receive an application message having an input message format from a message sending device, convert the application message having the input format to an application message having an output format, and transmit the application message having the output format to a message receiving device. In addition, feed adapters typically process information requests regarding data contained in the converted application messages from message receiving devices.
In current messaging environments, software architects typically configure feed adapters to perform application message conversion between only a fixed set of application message formats. This fixed set of application message formats is often hard-coded into a conversion module on the feed adapter. Any changes made to the application message formats or the configuration of a feed adapter typically require extensive recoding of the conversion module and subsequence recompilation of the new computer code. In fact, even slight modifications to current feed adapters often involve substantial financial and human resources. Readers will, therefore, appreciate that room for improvement exists for application message conversion using feed adapters.